The Effect of Perceived Challenges and Skills on the Quality of Subjective Experience

ABSTRACT This article investigates the effects that perceived challenges and skills in activities have on the quality of everyday life experience. Based on flow theory it was predicted that quality of daily experience would depend on the challenge experienced and skill required in specific situations, as well as on the balance between challenge and skill. The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) was used on a sample of 208 talented adolescents to measure daily variations in four dimensions of experience (concentration, wish to do the activity, involvement, and happiness) in four contexts (in school, with relatives, with friends, and in solitude). The four dimensions of experience were regressed on the predictors challenges, skills, and their absolute difference expressing the balance/imbalance of challenges and skills. Hierarchical linear modeling, explained in detail herein, was conducted on a 1-week sample of experiences. Findings confirm the prediction of flow theory that the balance of challenges and skills has a positive and independent effect on the quality of experience. Yet some differences of parameter estimates were found between dimensions of experience and between social contexts. These heterogeneities call for a further improvement of the flow model.     

Elevation and mentoring: An experimental assessment of causal relations

Mentoring is a prosocial behavior in which an experienced person guides someone with less experience. Elevation refers to the responses elicited when a person witnesses others upholding the highest standards of moral virtue. Three experimental studies bring these two domains together. For all three studies, participants were randomly assigned to either read a story of someone exhibiting moral excellence or to a control condition. Participants in the elevation condition reported feeling more elevated, more positive attitudes toward mentoring, less negative attitudes toward mentoring, greater intentions to become a mentor (Study 1); an increased proclivity to gather information about becoming a mentor (Study 2a); and, an increased tendency to engage in mentoring directly via submitting advice to students (Study 2b). In their totality, the current studies link another prosocial outcome with elevation and demonstrate a condition under which individuals are more likely to be motivated to become a mentor.     

Attentional involvement and intrinsic motivation

The current study used the Experience Sampling Method to examine attentional involvement??the degree to which one??s attention is devoted to moment-to-moment activity??as a potential mediator of two previously identified relationships within the field of intrinsic motivation: (1) the positive relationship between a balance of challenges and skills and enjoyment, and (2) the positive relationship between competence valuation and enjoyment. Multilevel, within-person analyses indicated attentional involvement fully mediated both relationships. Implications of the findings for intrinsic motivation processes are discussed.     

Differential Effects of Divergent Thinking,Domain Knowledge,and Interest on Creative Performance in Art and Math

The purpose of this study was to investigate the main effects of divergent thinking, domain knowledge, and two types of interest (i.e., individual and situational interest) on creative performance in art and math, as well as moderating and mediating effects of the two types of interest. A series of hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted on data collected from 221 Korean 8th graders. Both divergent thinking and domain knowledge contributed to creative performance in art and math. However, the relative importance of these two factors was different in the two domains. In art, divergent thinking explained more of the variance in creative performance than domain knowledge did; in math, domain knowledge explained more of the variance than divergent thinking. Individual interest had no statistically significant main effect either in art or math. Situational interest had a statistically significant main effect on creative performance in math, but not in art. None of the hypothesized moderating and mediating effects of the two types of interest was statistically significant. The theoretical implications of the study are discussed, especially with respect to linking the relative importance of the variables in this study to the different domain structures of art and math.     

What we must Accomplish in the coming Decades

Abstract. In order to survive as a species and grow in complexity, humanity must adopt a new image of what it means to be human, rediscover a reward system beyond the merely material, and see that young people find joy in challenges and in cooperating with others.     

Self-awareness and aversive experience in everyday life

One hundred and seven adults reported their activities, thoughts, and feelings at randomly designated intervals over seven days, resulting in more than 4,800 self-reports. The present investigation focused on the relation of self-awareness and voluntariness to the quality of experience. Results indicated that perceived voluntariness is associated with positive experience, while self-awareness is associated with lower affect, activation, and personal involvement, but only when the activity is felt to be voluntary. This conditional association between self-awareness and aversive experience is discussed as it relates to current theory on self-awareness and recent models of human motivation.     

Motivation and Academic Achievement: The Effects of Personality Traits and the duality of Experience

The present study examined the relationship of personality, experience while studying, and academic performance. One hundred and seventy talented high-school students (68 males, 102 females) completed the Personality Research Form (PRF) and recorded their experience via the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). The results showed that controlling for ability, work orientation, a PRF factor, was a better predictor of grade than experience. However, an experiential variable,intrinsic motivation while studying, was related to the difficulty level of courses students took over the 4 years of high school. The results supported the notion that there are two kinds of motivation in scholastic achievement, one directed toward long-term goals, the other directed toward ongoing experience.